Portable electronic devices including, for example, smart telephones and wireless PDAs are becoming increasingly common and typically integrate functions of personal information management such as calendaring, data communications such as email, World Wide Web browsing and telecommunications in a single device. Such devices run on a wide variety of networks from data-only networks such as Mobitex and DataTAC to complex voice and data networks such as GSM/GPRS, CDMA, EDGE, UMTS AND CDMA2000 networks.
Portable electronic devices include a visual display such as a liquid crystal display (LCD) screen for presenting information to the user of the device. Of course, for many portable electronic devices, the size of the LCD screen is small so that the portable electronic device is handheld and is easily transported in, for example, a user's pocket. The displays of these handheld devices are used for displaying information to the user in the form of, for example, menus, lists and text displays. Many devices with electronic mail functionality provide a list of email message headers representing email messages sent from and/or received at the portable electronic device upon user selection of an email option from a menu screen. Each email header in these lists typically provides, for example, an indication of the status of the message to which the header relates, the time of the message, an address field and a subject field for the message. Of course with the limited size of the display screen, it is common that only portions of the address and subject fields are displayed.
The display of content on these devices is often customizable such that display attributes including font type and font size is user-selectable. To ensure that sufficient characters of the address and subject fields are displayed in an email header list so that the user is provided with some context relating to the message, the user is left to reduce the font size for display. With the reduction of font size, more characters can be displayed in each line of the list. For users who desire larger font sizes, often very little information regarding individual messages can be determined from the email header list.